Many tuberous vegetables, such as sugar beets having the scientific name Beta Vulgaris, are harvested from fields and transported to a storage facility that is remote from a processing facility. Because sugar beets must be harvested in a relatively short amount of time, the time between when the sugar beets have finished growing until the first freeze, the processing facilities typically do not have adequate capacity to process all of the harvested crops during the harvest season. Therefore, the storage facilities are necessary to provide an area for the harvesters to safely store the sugar beets until the processing facility has sufficient capacity to process the harvested crop.
Typically, the sugar beets are transported from the field to the storage facility utilizing trucks which then dump the harvested goods on a concrete pad. As capacity becomes available within the processing facility, the sugar beets are then transported to the processing facility utilizing trucks such as semi tractor-trailers. However, due to the rising fuel costs, a significant amount of the farmer's profit can be consumed in transportation costs from the storage facility to the processing facility.